Beirut Art Center is pleased to present Exposure 2011, the third edition of a collective exhibition of works by emerging Lebanese artists as well as non-Lebanese artists living in Lebanon.

Initiated in 2009, Exposure is an annual exhibition organized in partnership with SGBL group to support up-and-coming artists from Lebanon by providing a platform to produce and display work that is not essentially aimed at the market.

Each year, the center issues a call for proposals whereby emerging artists are invited to present a new artwork or an artwork that has not been shown in the country. A jury made up of individuals active in the contemporary art scene is invited by Beirut Art Center to select the artists who will participate in the show. This year’s jury was composed of Bruce Ferguson (curator and academic), Sarah Rogers (art historian), Fadi Tufayli (writer and poet) and Paola Yacoub (artist), along with one voice given to Beirut Art Center’s artistic board.

Following this year’s call for proposals, seven works were selected by the jury. The artists selected are from an eclectic mix of places, from a Lebanese artist living in China to a German living in Lebanon. They present work in a wide range of media, from installation, photography and performance, to video and sound experiments.

A catalog featuring the work of all participants will be produced and launched at the opening of the show on November 30. The catalog will serve to document the exhibition and introduce the work of these artists to a wider public.

Biographies

Nadia Al Issa is an independent cultural practitioner, writer and artist based in Beirut, Lebanon. She graduated with a BA in History of Art from Bryn Mawr College, Bryn Mawr, PA in 2006. She previously headed the interpretation and learning programs at Darat al Funun in Amman, Jordan and was Assistant Director at Beirut Art Center and the local coordinator for Meeting Points 6 in Beirut. Nadia Al Issa is the author of a handbook on learning within the gallery context for art teachers and institutions in the Arab world specific to works by contemporary Arab artists, forthcoming from the British Council and in collaboration with Tate Britain and Darat al Funun. She contributes regularly to Art Asia Pacific and is the magazine’s Beirut Desk Editor. Nadia Al Issa is currently developing a series of intervention works that explore the politics of belonging and exclusion inherent in nationalist thought and ideology. She is presenting the first work from the series, Untitled (8 km – A Tribute to Danis Tanović), for which she plans to camp out for two days in the no man’s land between Lebanon and Syria, in Exposure 2011.

Born in Beirut in 1976, Ali Cherri graduated in Graphic Design from the American University of Beirut in 2000. In parallel to his design work, he finished his Master’s in Performing Arts at DasArts (Amsterdam - 2005). His video work includes: Un Cercle Autour du Soleil (2005, Awarded FAAP digital arts award at VideoBrasil, Sao Paulo), Untitled (2006), Slippage (2007) and You (2008). Ali has
presented Give me a body then (performance, 2005) as part of Diskurs 05 Germany (2005) and Home Works III Beirut. In 2005, Ali presented the video installation Once A Shiny Morning Puddle (UNCLASSIFIED - MEETING POINTS 5 and at KUNSTHALLE – Vienna, 2011) and in 2009 the
Interactive video installation Now I Feel Whole Again as part of A FANTASY FOR ALAIN KAPROW at the Contemporary Image Collective, Cairo. His video installation My Pain is Real (2010) was presented at Galerie Imane Farès, Paris as part of the Co_incidences exhibition. Ali Cherri has presented his work in various film festivals and venues including the Centre Pompidou (Paris), VideoBrazil (Sao Paolo), The Delfina Foundation (London), Tate Modern (London), Home Works (Beirut), Festival Paris Cinéma (Paris), Contemporary Image Collective (Cairo), Modern Art Oxford (Oxford), Manifesta (Amsterdam), KunstFilmBiennale (Köln), Instituto Itaú Cultural Belo Horizonte (Brasil), Kasa Galeri (Istanbul), Edinburgh International Film Festival (Edinburgh), Shout Festival (Birmingham), and Huarte Centro de Arte Contemporáneo (Spain). His solo exhibitions include A Fleure de Peau at Galerie Regard Sud, Lyon and Bad Bad Images at Galerie Imane Farès, Paris in 2011. Laure de Selys is a Belgian and French artist, born in Geneva in 1986. She studied at Universität der Kunst (Berlin) with Katharina Sieverding and at Académie Libanaise des Beaux Arts (Beirut) in the new media department. In 2010, she received a Master’s in Fine Arts from the Ecole Nationale des Arts Visuels de la Cambre (Brussels). From 2006 to 2010, she has been adapting, writing, filming and acting for aether9, a collaborative web performance project focusing on remote real time storytelling. Her work has been exhibited in several collective exhibitions in Berlin (Imago FotoKunst Gallery), Brussels (Atelier 340, Dexia Art Center, Halles de Schaerbeek), Paris (Access&Paradox Art Fair) and Beirut (Badguer-Araman factory, Art Lounge). In 2009, her work was also presented in Palestine for the Riwak Biennale as a resident of Al-Mahatta Gallery in Ramallah. Laure de Selys currently lives and works between Brussels and Beirut.

Bassem Mansour was born and raised in Beirut. He left Lebanon in 1997, and has been traveling constantly since. He is an interior architect, multimedia, AV, and installation artist. His work is influenced by people’s social behavior and their engagement in the activities of daily life within their immediate surroundings. Mansour examines the different correspondences between the audible, the visual, noise and memory. His video work is mostly a series of solo performances and experiments in which he tests the limit of repetition and the idea of form. In 2005, he teamed up with artist Fritzi Metzger and formed ‘FiFi & Baa Productions’. In 2006, he had his first solo exhibition Fish don’t Apologize at Dar Al-Funoon, Kuwait. Since 2007, he has been exhibiting in The Sultan Gallery and took part in a series of collectives curated by Fatima Alqadiri. In 2010 he designed a 160m2 Installation for the launch of Established & Sons. He is presently based between Kuwait, Beirut, and Italy. Dana Aljouder graduated from the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York with a Bachelor in Architecture in 2009. In 2008, she received the SILS Twining Fellowship Scholarship allowing her to conduct research in Florence on the allegory of the Medici family through Renaissance poetry, painting and sculpture. In 2008, she had her first solo exhibition, The Chair, based on a chair constructed in Copenhagen, at the Pratt Insitute’s Higgins Hall in Brooklyn. She also participated in Bidoun magazine’s Mahma Kan Ethaman as Shaikha Shaikha, directed by Fatima Alqadiri & Khalid Algharaballi. In 2010, Aljouder designed the wall and ceiling installations for the Albert Reichmuth Wine Showroom in Zurich with OOS ag. In 2011, she participated in the project ‘Il Hawdaj’ with Peter Currie and Aziz Alqatami in the collaborative exhibition 50/20 at The Sultan Gallery in Kuwait. She is currently employed in Kuwait at Aziz Alqatami & Dana Aljouder Architects.

Franziska Pierwoss is a visual artist living and working in Beirut and Berlin. Born in Tübingen, Germany, in 1981 she attended Waterford College, Swaziland and then continued her education at the Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig where she received a Diploma in Fine Arts. She first travelled to Lebanon in 2007 as an exchange student with the Lebanese University, Beirut through a DAAD Scholarship. In 2010, she received the Young Artist Prize from the Goethe Institute and was invited for
a residency in Naples, Italy. Her work has been exhibited in various institutions in Germany, including Galerie Artacker, Berlin and the Kunstverein, Bonn. Many of her performances have been carried out around Lebanon, using spaces such as 98weeks in Beirut and the Rachid Karami Fair in Tripoli. Stéphanie Saadé was born in Beirut in 1983. She started studying Philosophy and Fine Arts in Lebanon, before moving to Paris in 2005. There, she enrolled at ENSBA (Ecole Nationale Supérieure
des Beaux-Arts de Paris), and studied with Christian Boltanski and Jean-Marc Bustamante. In 2008, she obtained a scholarship to study at the China Academy of Arts of Hangzhou, and started learning Chinese traditional printmaking, a little known subject and technique. After graduating from ENSBA in 2010 with a Masters, she received another scholarship to continue studying Chinese traditional printmaking, and moved back to Hangzhou. She is currently pursuing her artistic practice between
China, France and Lebanon, alongside her research on the history of landscape. It is closely related to her work as an artist, which is based on formal experimentation that often focus on the isolation of elements of landscape, and their representation. The artist places these elements in artificial relationships with pieces of furniture, photographs, museum objects or details of clothes, evoking the perception man has had and has of nature, his acquired appreciation of it and its methods, and the
place he has assigned to himself in it. Each part of the sculpture, whether fabricated or borrowed, fluctuates between different categories and statuses. Her work has been exhibited recently in galleries in China (New Layer-Views to resolve, Direct Art Center, Hangzhou, 2011, Fake Game Real Life, Monaddigital, Shanghai, 2011) and Paris (SUR LE RING, Espace des Arts sans Frontières, 2011, Strates, l’art dans la ville, Le 6B, 2011).

Setareh Shahbazi was born in Tehran, Iran in 1978 and moved to Germany in 1985. From 1997 to 2003 she studied Scenography and Media Arts at the Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung in Karlsruhe. Supported by a scholarship from the DAAD, she spent one year in Beirut in 2003, where she worked on the project Oh, no, no... – The Crystal Series in cooperation with the Arab Image Foundation. She has had solo exhibitions at Karlsruher Kunstverein in 2004, Galerie Sfeir-Semler, Hamburg and Montgomery, Berlin in 2006, the Contemporary Arts Forum, Santa Barbara in 2008 and at 98weeks, Beirut in 2010. Setareh Shahbazi has participated in various group shows, including Jostari dar Salighe va Ehsass at Asar Galerie Tehran, Whenever it starts, it is the right time! at Frankfurter Kunstverein, Rainbow at Galerie Sfeir-Semler Beirut, J’en rêve at Fondation Cartier in Paris and Iranian Pool at Rooseum in Malmö. She lives and works in Berlin, travels regularly to Beirut and Tehran and dreams of moving to LA one day.